


A Lot to Think About

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: F/M, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Compliant, Post-Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:40:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25531492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: Following the events of 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child', Harry contemplates a career shift, as he and Ginny decide whether Albus can spend the summer holiday with Scorpius at Malfoy Manor, and discuss what Hogwarts meant to them in their pasts.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Kudos: 14





	A Lot to Think About

Everything was normal again, nothing was really the same, and an innocent was dead. Voldemort had returned, and exacted the usual price. Harry was used to days, as an Auror, when he wondered if his calling and efforts had really done any good, at all. Cynicism and defeat couldn’t help but creep in, sometimes, like when Ron had told him, looking exhausted and older than their 21 years, that he had had enough of life as an Auror, or whenever evidence of the posthumous cult of hero worship of Voldemort was found. The man was dead, but the shadow he had cast over Wizardkind had morphed into a darkly glamourous blueprint for a new generation of wizards who flocked to his symbols and tactics. If Harry feared anything, it was that some other wizard would find out about Voldemort’s Horcruxes, and try the same thing.  
No, that was not his only fear…Albus’s disappearances had taught him that he had many fears, many of them regarding his second son: that Albus hated him, that he was unhappy, that he would never be happy again after all he had seen and been manipulated to do, that he would become a Dark Wizard under the influence of his own unhappiness and the dark atmosphere of Slytherin house, the way Voldemort himself had. A part of Voldemort had lived in Harry….had he given that part of himself to Albus?  
He lay in bed with his head whirring, thinking of all this and unable to sleep. Dinner had been tense, as Albus revealed that Scorpius Malfoy had written and asked if Albus could spend a few weeks out of the summer at Malfoy Manor.   
“We’ll think about it,” Ginny had said, swiftly and neutrally, before Harry could say the wrong thing.   
The evening had gone on normally, after that, the Potter family all settling in to their particular amusements: James to read comic books, Lily to classify species of magical flora she had found on her expeditions into the woods, Ginny to revise her Daily Prophet article, Harry to do that paperwork he owed Hermione, and Albus…if he was walking by the river that ran whisperingly by their home, if he was in the yard doing chores, or doing his homework, Harry always wondered what was going on in his head.  
His eyes pained a bit as the room flooded with unexpected light.  
“Lumos”, Ginny cast, and said to Harry, “I can hear you thinking, and its bloody loud,” as she sat up in bed. She was wearing a flannel nightgown, and finger combing her coppery red hair. Harry put his glasses on.  
“Nothing. Get some rest,” he said.  
“Is it about the invitation?” she asked.   
“You must admit, its surreal,” Harry said. “our son, spending the summer hols at that place…”  
“They’re not you and Draco. They have a real friendship. Met on the train, struck up something…as innocent as you and Ron, and what they have is just as rare. You can’t deny Scorpius went to Hell and back for Al,” she said.  
‘Like my family did for you,’ Harry heard, though she did not say. Ron, who was possessed, Bill, who was scarred, and Fred…who was gone.   
“He’s a brave boy,” Harry admitted.  
Clever, brave, and loyal…why, exactly, hadn’t Scorpius Malfoy been a Gryffindor? ‘Be glad he wasn’t,’ Harry reminded himself-or he and Albus never would have known each other. His only friend would, perhaps, have been Delphi, and who knew what else she would have seduced him to do, if he had not had Scorpius protesting, albeit limply, some points of the plan.  
“He’s a motherless boy. I can’t imagine living in that house all alone, with a father who can’t connect to him,” Ginny said.  
“You and Astoria…weren’t you in the same year? What was she like?” Harry asked, just to move the conversation along, and maybe to get some insight on Scorpius. He understood, now, that the boy was devoted to Albus, but he didn’t know his nature, his heart. He’d thought that Scorpius was the dark cloud Bane had spoken of, and it was easy to think because he had written him off the moment he saw his resemblance to his father: just as Snape had done him, Harry.   
Ginny’s face took on a curious expression, one that Harry took to mean she was surprised he had asked. Fair enough, Slytherins and Gryffindors had too much animosity to know each other well.  
“She was…decent. Not one of the worst. But, they weren’t all Slytherins, anyway,” Ginny said.  
Harry frowned, unsure of her meaning.  
“The worst? The worst of what?” Harry asked.  
“You know how it was, for my family, there,” Ginny said.  
Harry didn’t want to say the wrong thing. To him, the Weasleys were golden, they had shone. They were considered the very lowest rung of Pureblood wizard families, but they were well-liked, athletic, and what friends they had were true friends. They, and their house, were always full of fun and warmth. They had become his family, and he felt gratitude mingled with guilt for all he had cost them.  
“I wish…there was a place besides Hogwarts. Maybe if that place existed, it would be better. But, I suppose there aren’t enough wizards in Britain for us to need more than one school. It is bloody huge. On the outside, there’s room for everybody…on the inside, it’s a big place to feel like you don’t fit,” Ginny said.  
“Gin…what did you mean, when you told Malfoy, that you envied us, too? Me, Ron, and Hermione,” Harry said.  
“The same things he meant, I suppose,” Ginny said. “After first year…after Tom…I suppose for a long while, I didn’t want a friend. I looked up, and realized after a while that I had gotten my wish: I didn’t have a real friend, just people to talk to about stuff that didn’t matter. It hit me during Dumbledore’s Army, I think, the first Dumbledore’s Army. I was a Weasley, and people let me know what they thought of that…but, that wasn’t why I didn’t get close to anyone. I’d found out what a dangerous thing a friend could be.”  
“Gin…” Harry said, unsure what to say, if she needed comfort, and how to give it.   
“But, I was wrong. Only the wrong friends are bad for you. The right friends….they keep you alive. They keep you sane. They make life better,” she said.   
“I had no idea. Ron always used to say you were too popular for your own good,” Harry said.  
Ginny laughed. “That’s one of the reasons I love you. You must be the one bloke who doesn’t know what it means when people say that about a girl. Boys came on strong when I joined the Quidditch team, I guess they noticed me for the first time. And, when I was dating Dean. You know how it is-blokes are competitive, they have to have what the other one’s got, take it from them, to prove something, I guess.”  
“That’s not what it was, for me,” Harry said.  
“I know, Harry. You’re you, after all,” Ginny said, smiling faintly, in one corner of her mouth like the Mona Lisa, and fond warmth dancing in her brandy colored eyes.  
“You never told me you didn’t like it at Hogwarts. We could have done something different with the kids; attendance isn’t compulsory,” Harry said.  
“You wouldn’t have understood…do you remember how I used to call Fleur ‘Phlegm’ behind her back?” Ginny said.  
He laughed involuntary at the brazen rudeness of it, just as he had done when he was a sweaty, spotty sixteen year old carrying grief like an anvil in his chest, and relieved to feel it abate as he laughed at Ginny’s antics, and she was a fifteen year old girl with hair so long it danced, in a waving, fiery flag below her waist as she walked on her toes in a mocking impression of Fleur’s Veela grace. No one had made him laugh in about a month, and he had never thought he would laugh again.  
“Yeah, I just faintly recall,” Harry said.  
“Sure,” Ginny said. “I couldn’t stand how she was always on about our house, and our family. I had enough of that shite at school…what are you supposed to feel, when someone insults your home? And…I couldn’t do that to you. Hogwarts is your home.”  
“But…all wizards don’t feel that way, do they? Only the ones who haven’t got homes. Me. Snape. Voldemort,” Harry said.  
“You put yourself in the worst company. Al gets that from you. No, don’t tell him I said that,” Ginny said, and grimaced.  
“Dies with me,” Harry said, smiling at Ginny’s runaway wit.  
“And, its not true,” she sighed. “I think this one’s down to my genes…I had Tom, just like Al had Delphi. But, at least he had Scorpius, too. He made a real friend before he made the wrong one, and that’s the difference between him and me.”  
“I always thought that…you were happy. Happier than me,” Harry said. “I was an idiot when I was 16, wasn’t I?”  
“Oh Harry,” Ginny said, as if sad that he had never realized it, “you were just a boy.”  
He hadn’t felt so at the time, and couldn’t understand it now. He looked at Ginny the way people look at a priceless painting after coming out of the rain into a museum, taking in her even and pleasant face, liquor brown eyes, sunset pink lips, healthy skin dotted with freckles, and fiery hair the color of new copper, shorn to her shoulders, no longer the enticing waving flag it had been in the corridors and Quidditch pitch of their school, the her unfettered breasts rested beneath the soft fabric of her pyjamas, and saw her now and her then. He thought he had captured a phoenix, an otherworldly being that radiated light and hope, when he gathered her into his arms and kissed her in the Gryffindor common room, and the strength he had seen in her brown eyes had always been a piercing mystery. Now he understood how alone she had been-saw the little girl left behind by her uninterested brothers, saw how she had both laughed and cried as she ran behind the train the first time he met her family, and imagined how she must have felt to find a friend, in Tom Riddle, the relief, elation, and perfect trust. Of course Hogwarts was not a happy place for her-so much, for Ginny, had died there, or abandoned her en route to that castle. But, she was not broken.   
“How d’you reckon the kids would take it if I was Defense Against the Dark Arts professor?” Harry asked her. He had put it off long enough.  
“Has McGonagall asked?” Ginny said.  
“Yeah, and before you answer, I think its down to me, or hiring Lockhart back,” Harry said.  
Ginny smirked. “I doubt that. From what I hear, he likes a quiet life since leaving St. Mungo’s-taken up portrait painting.”   
“We can guess whose portrait. No, really, I mean it. I’ve been asked, but, I didn’t know when to mention it,” Harry said.  
“You were the best teacher I ever had. But, isn’t the job cursed?” Ginny said.  
Voldemort was gone. His curses should, if all the laws of magic held true, have no power any longer. But, as they had seen so recently, the laws of magic could be pushed to breaking, and then reform themselves in a new and confounding from. Was it worth risking their family once more? Was Hogwarts worth it? He saw now, afresh, that the castle took at least as much as it gave.   
“You and Al,love a touch of drama, you two. I’m not taking credit for that one. You’ve both given me a lot to think about for this week,” Ginny said, and clicked off the light, leaving Harry in suspense, with a bemused smile on his face. ]


End file.
